A 345 mW Heterogeneous Many-Core Processor With an Intelligent Inference Engine for Robust Object Recognition

TLDR: A heterogeneous many-core processor is presented that realizes the UVAM algorithm, which incorporates the familiarity map on top of the saliency map for the search of attentive points, to achieve fast and robust object recognition of cluttered video sequences.

Abstract: Fast and robust object recognition of cluttered scenes presents two main challenges: (1) the large number of features to process requires high computational power, and (2) false matches from background clutter can degrade recognition accuracy. Previously, saliency based bottom-up visual attention [1,2] increased recognition speed by confining the recognition processing only to the salient regions. But these schemes had an inherent problem: the accuracy of the attention itself. If attention is paid to the false region, which is common when saliency cannot distinguish between clutter and object, recognition accuracy is degraded. In order to improve the attention accuracy, we previously reported an algorithm, the Unified Visual Attention Model (UVAM) [3], which incorporates the familiarity map on top of the saliency map for the search of attentive points. It can cross-check the accuracy of attention deployment by combining top-down attention, searching for “meaningful objects”, and bottom-up attention, just looking for conspicuous points. This paper presents a heterogeneous many-core (note: we use the term “many-core” instead of “multi-core” to emphasize the large number of cores) processor that realizes the UVAM algorithm to achieve fast and robust object recognition of cluttered video sequences.